Eats, chutes, and leaves: The well-known expert on humane slaughter dishes up several choice nuggets about how size and line speed aren’t the determining factors when it comes to whether a slaughterhouse is “good” or “bad.” What’s important “is whether people...

(Steph Larsen photos)Everyone knows the Boy Scouts” motto: Be Prepared. While my immediate inclination is to ask “For what?”, it”s as good a command as any to live by. One at which I failed miserably last week. I came home from work and went out to the sheep paddocks to make sure...

Why slaughterhouses should be open to the public: USDA and the Vermont Agency of Agriculture have suspended operations at the Bushway Packing plant in Grand Isle, VT, a facility that processes veal calves, pending a continuing investigation based on abuses uncovered by the Humane Society. Videotape from...

By Jake Lahne I want to describe our unfamiliarity with animal slaughter as “startling,” “surprising,” or “shocking.” After all, in the United States we consume a staggering amount of meat: more than 220 pounds per person per year on average. Yet while it’s...

Slaughter, Airstream-style: Livestock producers in Washington’s Puget Sound region are pinning their hopes on a 45-foot mobile meat processing unit that will travel from farm to farm, eliminating the logistical nightmares (including a several-hour drive) associated with the few mega-slaughterhouses...

Abattoir blues: A few farmers the Ethicureans know like to say they raise meat that “has only one bad day in its life” — the day they get loaded in trailers off the pasture and taken to a slaughterhouse. After talking to animal-slaughter expert Temple Grandin, Rebecca Marx writes: “While...